CERC: Flannery O'Connor: Stalking Pride

There have been mini-libraries that discuss, dissect and analyze the stories of the great Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor. In this fine review by Amy Wellborn, the "essentials of her writing" are revealed. This review, in short, is an "oldie but goodie."

Here is just a snippet:

O’Connor’s characters are all afflicted by pride: Intellectual sons and daughters who live to set the world, primarily their ignorant parents, aright; social workers who neglect their own children, self-satisfied unthinking “good people” who rest easily in their own arrogance; the fiercely independent who will not submit their wills to God or anyone else if it kills them. And sometimes, it does.

The pride is so fierce, the blindness so dark, it takes an extreme event to shatter it, and here is the purpose of the violence. The violence that O’Connor’s characters experience, either as victims or as participants, shocks them into seeing that they are no better than the rest of the world, that they are poor, that they are in need of redemption, of the purifying purgatorial fire that is the breathtaking vision at the end of the story, “Revelation.”

If you haven't sampled O'Connor's work, this review is a good launching point. I hope you decide to explore more!